Mr. & Mrs. Smith was Alfred Hitchcock’s only attempt at a romantic comedy, and you can see why he didn’t try again. It doesn’t help that Norman Krasna’s script — about a loving wife who, discovering she’s not legally married to her husband, decides to leave him — makes no sense. As the husband, Robert Montgomery is quite deft, but Lombard seems strained and uncomfortable. And though it has a big rep and many people are fond of it, I don’t think much of To Be or Not To Be either; the combination of farce and anti-Nazi melodrama is bizarre when it isn’t downright creepy, and the casting of Lombard and Jack Benny as famous Polish Shakespeareans is unfathomable. If you love Lombard, you don’t want to hear her read damp platitudes about how terrible war is, and you don’t want to wonder what she’s doing married to Benny. But all three of the ’30s comedies in the series are champions, and they showcase virtuoso Lombard turns.
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The driving force of Hitchcock's 1939 film The 39 Steps is suspense, as unwitting bachelor Richard Hannay gets caught up in espionage, train escapes, weapons technology, and the future of Europe and the world.
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The indoor equivalent to summertime beach reading is the stage melodrama.
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At his lowest, Hitch refers to an early edit of Psycho as "stillborn." That description also applies to this film.
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Park Chan-wook, whose Korean films Oldboy , Thirst , and others have earned him cult status in the West, acknowledges the similarities between his first Hollywood movie, Stoker , and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt . Call it an homage, since a Hitchcock film convinced him to become a director.
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WICKED is a very different witch hunt from the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel on which it is based.
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